“Too Hip For This Room”
A George Carlin Biopic
Conceived, Curley’s Hotel, Rockaway Beach, NY August, 1936, nine
months later born George Denis Patrick Carlin May 12, 1937. His
parents rocky relationship reaches its peak and in July of 1937 leads
to his mother escaping down a fire escape with George and his brother
Patrick in toe they meet with Uncle Tom and escape in his car and are
now refugees at Peg Willets’ farm in the Catskills and finally in 1937
his parents become legally separated, Carlin remember few details
about his father who subsequently dies in 1945. One of George’s
earliest memories is the family sitting around the radio in the living
room listening a partial eclipse of the sun and it is at this time he
is told the family motto “Someday We’ll all have hats”, something
George will come to reference later on in his career as a stand up
comedian.
In 1941 he moves to 519 West 121st street, NYC and stays for 25 years,
its here that he experiences many firsts including sex, drugs, rhythm
and blues.
George’s mother taught him a dance craze of the 1930′s called “The Big
Apple”, which she would later coax him to show to her work colleagues,
its at this young age he realises that doing something for people
pleased them and gained some level of approval, this lead to his
mother teaching him imitations of people such as May West and Johnny
The Philp Mars Midget.
On his own as he grew up through years 6 to 10 learned that he could
in his own words “gain approval, attention, applause, approbation, all
these A’s I never got in school”.
In a fifth grade class he is asked to write an autobiography detailing
what he wants to be and its at this stage he identifies “comedian” as
one of his career paths, aware that he likes attention and likes the
process of standing up in front of people to entertain them, something
he attributes to the lack of father figure in his life and his mother
absence at work all day. Carlin develops a strong desire to emulate
his childhood hero from the movies. comedian Danny Kaye, growing up at
the tail end of the golden age of the radio and just before the golden
age of television comedians he makes comedy paramount in his life,
influenced by:
Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy, Charlie McCarthy and Edgar
Bergen, Fred Allen, The Bob Hope Show, Bing Crosby and several Radio
Sit Coms such as “Date With Judy” and magazines such as “Thousand
Jokes” and “Ballyhoo”, “panic comics” and “mad comics”
George dropping out of school.
With radio buddy, Jack Burns, flees Texas for Hollywood to pursue
nightclub career as comedy team, Burns & Carlin. Leave with $300. and
brand-new Dodge Dart Pioneer.
Then it will talk about how Carlin started his solo career but got
stuck in the club scene and wanted to break out and how he literally
forced his final show by laying on the floor and describing the
ceiling and they slowly faded out the lights on him that day, then he
got his big break on the college circuit something he’d wanted to do
for a long time and that shot him to the big time
“As America entered the Magic Decade, I was leading a double life …
My affection for pot continued and my disregard for standard values
increased, but they lagged behind my need to succeed. The Playboy
Club, Merv Griffin, Ed Sullivan and the Copacabana were all part of a
path I found uncomfortable but necessary during the early 1960s. But
as the decade churned along and the country changed, I did too.
Despite working in ‘establishment’ settings, as a veteran malcontent I
found myself hanging out in coffee houses and folk clubs with others
who were out-of-step people who fell somewhere between beatnik and
hippie. Hair got longer, clothes got stranger, music got better. It
became more of a strain for me to work for straight audiences. I took
acid and mescaline. My sense of being on the outside intensified. I
changed.” Again with Larry Wilde he elaborated, “I began to change in
sixty-nine, seventy … That’s when I began to experiment with acid. I
had been a pot smoker most of my life … what the acid did was to
spring me past the frontier, to artificially get me to the next step
… [LSD] pushed me over to see that ‘Hey, I’m wasting my time with
these people, I don’t really like them, I’m sort of entertaining the
enemy. They’re kind of a safe, play it safe, middle-class audience and
I’m playing it safe with them – and I feel differently inside, let me
get it out of me!”
Copa This was evident to the wealthy, white bread crowd at The
Copacabana, New York’s posh, mobster run nightclub. Carlin had
successfully played the venue in the past, but the guilt and
dissatisfaction eating away at him, no longer allowed him to put on
the Scott McClellan face of “I believe everything I’m saying and I’m
happy to be here.” The Copa was the place to record high-energy
medleys of white America’s favorite standards for every recording
artist from Paul Anka to Jackie Wilson, but in 1969, Carlin could no
longer muster it. “I was straining at the leash … I knew I didn’t
belong in that place,” Carlin said in Comedy at the Edge. He expressed
his pain and dismay to the crowd over the course of the two-week
engagement, “These places went out of style twenty years ago. I see
Don Ameche dance past me one more time, I’m getting the fuck out of
here.” In the same book Zoglin explains that for Carlin it was
liberating: ‘The Copa let him play out his engagement but at the end
of his last show gave him a pointed send-off. “It was very artistic,
very cinematic,” Carlin recalls.
“Toward the end of my act, they slowly turned my light off. Instead of the usual thing where the band plays you off, they just brought the light down slowly. And they took the sound down at the same time. Very dramatic. It was almost sweet in a way. And I knew I was free.”
